War For The Oaks Part 2

"And you'll need someone to tell you you're gonna be okay."

Eddi smiled sheepishly. "You must have done this yourself."

"Everybody has to, at least once. Don't beat yourself over the head for it."

The light was red at Washington and Hennepin, the corner where Carla would begin negotiating the rat's nest of one-way streets that led to Eddi's apartment. "Let me off here," she said suddenly.

"Wha-why?"

"I want to walk. It's a nice night."

Carla was shocked. "It's freezing. And you'll get murdered."

"You've been living around the lakes too long. You think any place with buildings more than three stories high is full of addicts."

"And I'm right. Anyway, what about your axe and stuff?"

It was true; she couldn't haul her guitar and amplifier fourteen blocks. She was settling back in the pa.s.senger seat when Carla spoke again.

"I know, I know. 'Carla, would you mind taking them to your place and carrying them all the way up the back stairs, then carrying them back down tomorrow when you come over to keep me from being miserable 'cause I broke up with my boyfriend?' Sure, Ed, what're friends for?"

Eddi giggled. "If you'd quit going to Ma.s.s, you'd make a great Jewish mother." She leaned over and hugged her.

"Jeez, will you get out of here? The light's changed twice already!" After Eddi had bounced out and slammed the door, Carla shouted through the half-open window, "I'll call at two!"

"Thank you!" Eddi yelled back, and waved as the station wagon rumbled and clanked away from the curb. The gold-and-gray flank of the library rose before her, and she followed it to the Nicollet Mall.

Whatever had tugged at her in the restaurant parking lot refused to be summoned back now. Eddi shook her head and started down the mall, and hoped that the effort would blow her melancholy away.

The rhythm of her steps reminded her of a dozen different songs at once, and she hummed one softly to herself. It was Kate Bush, she realized, "Cloudbusting," and she sang it as she walked.

Then she saw the figure standing by the bus shelter across the street.

By the shape, it was a man-a man's broad-brimmed hat and long, fitted coat. He didn't move, didn't seem even to turn his head to watch her, but she had a sudden wild understanding of the idea of a bullet with one's name on it. This figure had her name on him.

You must be feeling mighty low, girl, she scolded herself, if you think that every poor idiot who's missed his bus is lying in wait for you. Still, the man seemed naggingly present, and almost familiar. And three in the morning was an odd hour to wait for a bus in a town where the buses quit running at half past midnight.

Her pace was steady as she crossed the empty street. Behind her, she heard his steps begin. It's not fair, she raged as she sped up. I don't need this, not tonight. She thought she heard a low laugh behind her, half the block away. Her stride lost some of its purpose and took on an edge of panic.

South of the power company offices, Eddi turned and headed for Hennepin Avenue. If there were still people on any street in Minneapolis, they would be on Hennepin. A police cruiser might even come by....

The footsteps behind her had stopped. There, see? Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d was just walking down Nicollet. I'll be fine now- A black, waist-high shape slunk out of the alley in front of her. Its bared teeth glittered as it snarled; its eyes glowed red. It was a huge black dog, stalking stiff-legged toward her. Eddi backed up a step. It made a ferocious noise and lunged. She turned and ran in the only direction she could, back toward Nicollet.

She got one of the streetlight posts on the mall between her and the dog and turned to face it. It wasn't there. Across the street, in the shadow of a doorway, Eddi saw the silhouette of the man in the hat and long coat. He threw back his head, and she heard his laughter. The streetlight fell on his face and throat and she saw the gleam of his white scarf, his dark skin and sloping, shining eyes. It was the man from the dance floor, from the University Bar. She ran.

The footsteps behind her seemed unhurried, yet they never dropped back, no matter how fast she ran.

She tried again to turn toward Hennepin. The black dog lunged at her from out of a parking ramp exit, its red eyes blazing.

This is crazy, she thought with the dead calm of fear. Muggers and mad dogs. I'm stuck in a Vincent Price movie. Where are the zombies?

She was running down Nicollet again before she realized that it couldn't be the same dog. But it was insane to think that the man could have known she would walk home, impossible to think he had a pack of dogs. Her breath burned in her throat. She had a st.i.tch in her side. Her pace had become a quick stumble.

She'd almost reached the end of the mall, she realized. Two blocks away were the Holiday Inn and the Hyatt, and she could run into either, into a lobby full of light and bellhops and a desk clerk who'd call the police. She staggered across the street toward Peavey Plaza and Orchestra Hall.

The black dog seemed to form out of the shadows. Perhaps it was only one dog, after all; surely there weren't two dogs like this. It was huge, huge, its head low, its fur bristling gunmetal-dark in the street light. It growled softly, in macabre counterpoint to the waterfall sounds of the Peavey Plaza fountain. Did the d.a.m.ned dog know it stood between her and safety? How had it gotten past her? She moved sideways, through the concrete planters that marked the sidewalk level of Peavey Plaza. The hotels seemed miles away now. She would have to try to lose both dog and man in the complexity of the ornamental pool and fountains below her, and escape out the other side.

The dog lifted its head and howled, and Eddi thought of the dark man and his laugh. She wanted to curse, to throw something, to be home in her bed. She raced down a flight of steps, then another.

The footsteps behind her were sudden, as was the tap on her shoulder. She tried to turn in midstride and her foot didn't land on anything. Just before she plunged backward and headfirst down the last of the steps, she saw the man behind her, his eyes wide, his hand reaching out.

Then pain took away her fear, and darkness took the pain.

chapter 2 Who Can It Be Now?

She heard water running, and two voices. Were she to wake, these would be trans.m.u.ted into ordinariness-the toilet wouldn't shut off, the neighbors were shouting on the other side of her bedroom wall.

"Fool!" raged a wild river of a voice. "Fool, I say!"

"Careful of your little tongue, dear. I've a mind to bite it off." This was a smoky, furry voice, laughing even as it threatened. Eddi heard a clicking, sc.r.a.ping sound, like a dog's toenails. That reminded her of something-what? Dogs, or toenails?

"You may have killed the mortal!"

"You amaze me," the deep voice replied. "Surely one mortal is much like another, to you?"

"Time grows short."

"Ah, of course. Time. Well, if she's harmed, it was by no work of mine." The deep voice added defensively, "And I softened her landing as best I could."

Her head ached, and she felt something cold and hard beneath her cheek-concrete? The conversation she heard was beginning to sound disturbingly sequential, less dreamlike.

"And if her people find her here?"

"Oh, they'll think of us straightaway, I'm sure! They'll think she drank too much and fell."

Fell. Eddi remembered falling-and being pursued. Suddenly she was desperate to shed her lethargy, to get up, to at least open her eyes.... She opened them, and nothing she saw made sense. A black shape against gray, moving water... The deep voice continued.

"But did you see her? She ran like a deer, Glaistig."

"I care nothing for your sport. Fool of a phouka! Are you a.s.s, as well as dog and man? Do the conditions of your task please you so that you wish to linger at it?"

There was a rumbling growl.

"Ah, have I the right of it?" said the water-voice in a fierce purr. "Does it please you to live in mortal filth and stink? To see the mockeries they build of the bones of the earth?" Then, soft and cold as snow, "Would you be some human's little dog?"

The snarl that answered, full of rage, drove out Eddi's la.s.situde. She lifted her head to look, and could at last make sense of what she saw.

The black dog stood beside and above her. The forepaw beneath her nose seemed as big as her own hand, with glossy black curls of toenails the size of a parrot's beak. Its hackles spiked upward all down its back, and it curled its lips, growling at the fountain.

Eddi turned her throbbing head to look. Not the fountain. A woman rose from the water, tall and slender. She seemed to be standing on its surface, to be a coalescence of water into a woman-shaped pillar.

Her long gown looked like water, too, spilling over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and straight down in a current of darkness and green-shot light. Where it reached the surface of the pool, it disappeared into it, indistinguishable. Her hair seemed fluid as well, but snowy white, pouring down around her to her feet. Her face and arms were moon white.

Then she turned her gaze to Eddi and smiled, and Eddi remembered how, as a child, she had fallen through weak ice into freezing water.

"Well," breathed the apparition, "it lives."

"Who-what are you?" Eddi croaked. She raised herself onto one arm, and the pain in her head made her squint. "I'm gonna scream for the cops."

The water-woman gave a gurgling laugh, and bowed to her.

Next to Eddi's ear, the deep voice said, "Do it, then." Eddi turned and found the dog watching her, tongue lolling over its wolfish teeth. The dog. . . talks. Oh, lord.

"Summon your police," the dog continued, its lips working in horrible parody. "What will you tell them when they come, and find a dog and a pool of water?" It gestured with its muzzle toward the fountain.

As Eddi watched, the woman sank into the water-or became the water, spreading out until only her eyes glinted in the moonlight, then disappeared.

Eddi rose to her knees and started to back away. The dog took her shoulder in its mouth. She felt the long canines through her jacket, and she stopped moving.

"'A's 'edder," said the dog, and let go. "Bide with us, sweet, until we give you leave to go."

"Why should I, if I can scare you off by calling the police?"

"Ah, but you can't. True, were you to call them, the glaistig"-with a rush of water the woman surfaced and shook her hair out around her-"would become a splash in the fountain, and I, a straying dog. But what of tomorrow night? Would they believe you, these policemen, if you told them you were haunted, and by what, and bid them stay beside you day and night? We will have you in the end; be wise, and let the end be now."

But by the dog's last word, Eddi had lunged for the stairs. Her vision blacked from rising too fast, but she kept on. This time she would outrun the d.a.m.n dog or let him tear her throat out. Her outstretched hand found the stair rail- Strong arms closed around her, pinning hers to her sides. She kicked backward, connected with something, and heard a hiss of pain. Hands fastened on her upper arms and spun her around.

It was the man who had chased her down the mall, the black man in the University Bar. The streetlights slanted across his face, and she could see his teeth clenched, the tumble of hair down his forehead, the shadows that hid his eyes. She didn't have time to wonder where he'd come from before he spoke.

"Idiot child! Do you want me to lose my temper?"

The words were clearer from the human lips and tongue, but the voice was the black dog's. That recognition must have shown in her face; he bared his teeth, and a dog's growl rose from his throat. Eddi swallowed thickly and closed her eyes.

His little laugh startled them back open. "Can it be?" he said with a taunting smile. "You watch the glaistig melt and never turn a hair, yet let me but change from dog to man, and your courage flies away!"

Fury rose up in her, shouldering her fear aside. "Let go of me," she said, her voice flat and icy. She shrugged his hands from her arms.

"Truly, I mean you no harm," he said.

"That must be why you pushed me down the stairs."

"I did not push you," he said, irritated. "You fell." He stretched out a hand as if to take hold of her again.

She stared at him until his hand fell back to his side. Then she walked across the pavement, back to the pool and the woman made of water.

"What do you want?" Eddi asked the silver-pale figure. Up close, the moonlight face was not so perfectly beautiful; the features were sharp and elongated.

"Your service, until we release you."

"Doing what?"

The water-woman smiled, a sweet, cruel expression, and Eddi saw that she had delicately proportioned fangs. But vampires don't like water, she thought with a shiver. "Doing whatever you're told, child of Man.

Is that not the nature of servitude?"

"Glaistig!" said the man-who-was-also-a-dog.

"You raise your voice to me," the woman said haughtily, looking past Eddi to where he stood.

"I would raise my leg to you, were you worth the effort. Leave be, Glaistig. Tease her, and she'll learn to bite." He stepped forward to the edge of the pool. He had to look up to meet the woman's eyes-he was not much taller than Eddi, though his ominous presence had made him seem larger. "I say there is no harm in telling her what we require."

"And if she mislikes the sound of it?"

"Why, perhaps she'll spit in your eye, Glaistig, and you can drown her. There's a treat for you, eh?"

"I would as soon not trouble." The water-woman turned an evaluating look on Eddi. Then she inclined her head, an approving gesture, and Eddi felt a rush of pleasure. She was startled by the woman's fluid silver beauty. All the cruelty she thought she'd seen in those features was gone.

"Your pardon," the water-woman said, her voice still cold, but now full of the cadences of old rivers.

"We will treat you very well, but you must not plague us with questions. Our concerns are greater than yours, and beyond your ken."

Eddi didn't agree-and yet, what in the water-woman's speech was unreasonable? These were great and n.o.ble beings, it was clear, and her business should be to do as they told her.

The woman watched her intently; the dark man, his face blank, looked from Eddi to the water-woman as if waiting. They wanted a response. Eddi could feel a nod pulling her chin down-and at last shook her head, though she didn't know why.

"You are a stupid little beast," the water-woman said pleasantly, with the force of absolute truth, "and will do as you are told."

Is that any way for a great and n.o.ble being to talk? Eddi thought. She felt as if she'd been drunk and was now suddenly sober. The woman in the pool was thin and witchy again.

"That's enough," Eddi said, and regarded her two captors warily. "Tell me what all this is about."

They were staring at her. "Well, Dog," the water-woman said at last, though she kept her eyes on Eddi, "you've chosen well and ill in equal measure. She is indeed more than she seems, though by Oak and Ash I cannot say how much. But you saw how she slipped the glamour as if it were a torn net. You'll have no easy task."

The dark man looked up at the water-woman as if he had a great deal to say and resented not being able to say it. Then he turned back to Eddi, and some of the same expression remained. "Eddi McCandry, the Seelie Court goes to war, and needs the presence of mortal blood to bring death to its enemies."

The phrase "mortal blood" sent a shooting cold through her, but she said, "That sounded like gibberish to me."

He hissed something under his breath. "I'll begin again. We are not human."

She couldn't help it-she laughed. They couldn't, of course, not be human. Nothing else had that shape.

And they couldn't possibly be human, because nothing human had more than one shape. They might indeed be werewolves and vampires, but she had no desire to hear them say so. She could see the seams of the world around her begin to ravel and part, and the things waiting outside to pa.s.s through the holes were at once terrible and ridiculous. It was like being tickled-an unpleasant feeling that by some perverse reflex brings on laughter. "So what are you?" she gasped.